In beekeeping; it's already been done.

[Cussword]

Just take a look at any political leader anywhere in the world - how many of them have their populations best interests at heart?.

What!!
You mean David Cameron doesn't love me at all!!!!

 

[Finman]

Remember also they didn't keep bees for producing honey.. honey was a waste product. Bees were kept to produce wax for candles..

.waste product. Good heavens!!! They went to buy sugar from shop and put it into tea 1000 years ago?

They surely kept bees for honey too. Skep had a hole on top, and then in summer skep had a super.
.
Skep knowledge has nothing to do with modern beekeeping. And what beekeepers learned in skep beekeeping, it has been moved to frame hive keeping.

It is false to believe that nothing new has been invented after skeps.

 

[sugarbush]

But American beekeepers have invented how bees can consume 50 kg winter food. It is easy when you do not use any insulation in winter.

Insulation.... on a beehive

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Remember also they didn't keep bees for producing honey.. honey was a waste product. Bees were kept to produce wax for candles..

No - they were kept for both. Honey was the only substance you had to sweeten stuff before the Indies were discovered.most people used tallow for lighting their homes, there is documentary evidence of beekeeping for honey (in Wales anyway) going back centuries, it was especially used in medicine, the word Mead is derived from the Welsh Medd which means healing, methegilin is derived from the welsh for healing water. - You could say that wax was a waste product of honey harvesting. Chicken and egg debate here.
Only monasteries and the greater houses used wax candles.

 

[Michael Palmer]

A couple of years ago I was reading some of Brother Adams works on queen rearing and realized it was nearly identical to the system that many New England Beekeepers use including Micheal Palmer. Mike promotes this system frequently, but does not take credit for it. But other people in the bee community now frequently call it his method. Mike admits that he learned much of how he keeps bees from Charles Mraz, who was well known to travel all over the world while studying different techniques. I assume that the most likely scenario is that Mraz learned directly from Bro Adam and passed the info onto Palmer.
QUOTE]

If you're going to use my name, get it right. Charles Mraz never used double nuc boxes, never wintered nuclei, and taught me nothing about the management technique. Mraz and his son/grandson used/use walk away splits. Grandson Chas is slowly starting to winter a few nucs...he just told me last week..."I'm finally getting it".

Kirk Webster showed me his double nucs wintering in his apiary. That's where I started. It was obvious, after some time at it, that Kirk got it from Adam, but changed the basic setup. I've tried to get it back closer to Adam's original setup, but also changed his management to fit my work.

Anyway Brian, that's closer to what has taken place.

 

[Finman]

Insulation.... on a beehive

Isnt that funny!

I feed to my hives on average 20 kg sugar in September. I extract all honey off.. Food store is enough to May.
This spring I took 5-10 kg winterfood off, that queen has space to lay. Winter was warm.

I live at same altitude as Alaska's Anchorage. In Alaska very famous beekeeper advices that give 3 langstrot boxes to wintering hive and 50 kg sugar.

In Fairbanks advice is that kill bees and buy nex spring package bees.

...good reason to laugh.....

I have same insulations over summer: Polyboxes and 7 cm plastic foam matres in the inner cover. Solid floors.
.
Every beekeeper keeps bees over winter in insulated hives.
.

 

[B+.]

Only monasteries and the greater houses used wax candles.

Beeswax was accepted as a suitable payment of tithe (rent for farming land owned by the church) because candles made from beeswax didn't produce an offensive odour (as tallow would) or produce smoke to stain the murals

 

[B+.]

[
Kirk Webster showed me his double nucs wintering in his apiary. That's where I started. It was obvious, after some time at it, that Kirk got it from Adam, but changed the basic setup. I've tried to get it back closer to Adam's original setup, but also changed his management to fit my work.

I'm curious when that was Mike.
My copy of "Contemporary Queen Rearing" by Harry H. Laidlaw Jr has a copyright notice in 1979 belonging to Dadant. On page 87 there is a photo of a 4-way mating nuc and I assumed that it was in common usage in the US. Is this not so?

 

[sugarbush]

Isnt that funny!

I feed to my hives on average 20 kg sugar in September. I extract all honey off.. Food store is enough to May.
This spring I took 5-10 kg winterfood off, that queen has space to lay. Winter was warm.

I live at same altitude as Alaska's Anchorage. In Alaska very famous beekeeper advices that give 3 langstrot boxes to wintering hive and 50 kg sugar.

In Fairbanks advice is that kill bees and buy nex spring package bees.

Anchorage and Fairbanks are two very different climates. Anchorage is temperate because of the ocean currents, Fairbanks is considered sub-arctic desert. When I was up there for college the January daytime highs were -40 degrees.

We do insulate hives here, I was being funny. The biggest issue we have here in New England is moisture with insulation. I don't believe the amount of feed with our bees have to do with insulation, but rather that they have been selected for different characteristics than what you guys have on that side of the pond. Many of our commercial operations don't even care about a honey crop, honey is secondary to population for pollination. I know commercial guys who do not even own extracting equipment.

 

[Fusion_power]

I know commercial guys who do not even own extracting equipment.

I know one migratory beekeeper running about 600 hives up and down the east coast of the U.S. who has another beekeeper extract his honey. He says that his profit is from pollination and the honey is just a sideline.

Nucleus beekeeping today is based on using nucs in the primary honey production stream. In the past, they were used for other purposes such as producing queens. Brother Adam had more optimizations in his beekeeping than any other beekeeper I've read about. Had he lived to continue working with bees, I'm sure he would have bred a varroa tolerant bee by now.

 

[B+.]

Brother Adam had more optimizations in his beekeeping than any other beekeeper I've read about. Had he lived to continue working with bees, I'm sure he would have bred a varroa tolerant bee by now.

Without taking anything away from Brother Adam, he was an old man. Embarking on such a programme is a lifes work

 

[sugarbush]

If you're going to use my name, get it right. Charles Mraz never used double nuc boxes, never wintered nuclei, and taught me nothing about the management technique. Mraz and his son/grandson used/use walk away splits. Grandson Chas is slowly starting to winter a few nucs...he just told me last week..."I'm finally getting it".

Kirk Webster showed me his double nucs wintering in his apiary. That's where I started. It was obvious, after some time at it, that Kirk got it from Adam, but changed the basic setup. I've tried to get it back closer to Adam's original setup, but also changed his management to fit my work.

Anyway Brian, that's closer to what has taken place.

No offence Mike
I wasn't speaking of wintered nuc techniques, just queen rearing. But the nuc system is another good example of what I am talking about. Like I said you don't intentionally take credit for any of these techniques, but do you disagree that many people are now calling these things your methods?

For example go to betterbee's site and search your last name and look what products come up. They use your last name as a keyword for the double nucs they sell. A system that you state you learned from Webster.

 

[Binge]

Pretty much.
Beekeepers have been solving the problems they CREATE(!) with whatever they had to hand for centuries.

Slight edit for you!

 

[B+.]

Slight edit for you!

Perhaps so!